Abstract

Frontal lobe lesions have been associated with impaired complex language use. Recently, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) has been implicated in dynamic aphasia, characterized by reduced response length and grammatical complexity in open-ended sentence formulation. In the present study, we examine narrative discourse performance following right and left DLPFC damage to determine the presence of characteristics described in the research literature on localized prefrontal lesions and language. The findings suggest that DLPFC results in impoverished language at the macrolinguistic and superstructural levels of discourse rather than microlinguistic and microstructural levels suggested in the research literature.